a bit of history of Aragon electronics, and it's genesis as "Mondial Designs" -- copied from a post on the Klipsch Forums:
"Courtesy of the home theater / hifi website, we have:
Acurus was founded in 1992 as the value brand of Mondial Designs. Mondial was started with the Aragon brand, well know for its high end electronics in audiophile circles. Mondial was founded in 1986 by Paul Rosenberg and Anthony Federici, the latter of whom has since left the business. In December of 2000 Mondial was bought out by Klipsch of speaker fame. Paul Rosenberg is still with Mondial as the Director of Marketing and New Product Development.
The initial Aragon products were actually designed by Dan D'Agostino of Krell. About 11 years ago, Mike Kusiak joined Mondial as Chief Designer and is responsible for all products since, including the DIA150. All Mondial amplifiers have the same design philosophy, i.e., no integrated circuits, motorized volume pots, glass-epoxy circuit boards, large transformers, lots of capacitance and bipolar output devices.
Also, check out the review of the Acurus DIA150 at http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_8_3/acurus-dia-150-integrated-amplifier-7-2001.html"
From my own memory -- As I was in the high end audio business back in the 80's and 90's -- Mondial came about as the brainchild of "Tony" Federici, who had been importing an Italian speaker line into the U.S. -- "ESB", and started Mondial as a marketing company -- he having had many contacts amongst the east coast major Hi End dealers of the 80's (Lyric in NYC, Sound Components in FL, etc.) as a Mfgrs. "Rep" and started Aragon with the assitance of Dan D' Agostino of Krell fame doing the electronics designs as a sub-contractor with Mondial.
(The name "Mondial" chosen for it's association with Ferrari and all things Italian, hence the importation of the Italian ESB speakers -- these being a visual copy of the very popular ADS large cabinet speaker designs)
Anyway, I'm not sure of which OEM mfgr. was making the Aragon amps at the time, but as we move into the early 90's, Mondial starts it's less expensive "Acurus" electronics line, made in So. Calif. by ATI (yes, that ATI -- who in the 70's and early 80's were known as "S.A.E" electronics -- owned by Morris Kessler -- I think Acurus is still made by ATI for Klipsch)
And so with Aragon at the "High end" and Acurus as the "Value" line, they continued on into the late 90's -- with some popularity for their "DIA" series of integrated amps, and later a CD player, and much later AV Processors for the beginning of the Home Theater craze that began to take over in the 90's. And today, Acurus still exists as a sub brand of Klipsch.
History lesson concluded -- any updates or corrections are welcome.